


Everything Is Going To Be Okay

by abelrunner



Category: Coco (2017)
Genre: AU of an AU, Broken Families and Broken Dreams, Gaslighting, Gen, mental trauma, reverse au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-11
Updated: 2018-08-11
Packaged: 2019-06-25 22:08:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15649875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abelrunner/pseuds/abelrunner
Summary: AU of im_fairly_witty's Villain AU, which I suggest reading prior to this because it's amazing.On Dia de los Muertos, Miguel learned one too many family secrets. He was sent home with a blessing requiring silence, but the burden sent him to an early grave. Having missed the chance for justice in the Living World, the chance for justice in the Land of the Dead might be the only thing Miguel has left.





	Everything Is Going To Be Okay

**Author's Note:**

  * For [im_fairly_witty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/im_fairly_witty/gifts), [death_frisbee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/death_frisbee/gifts).



They’d gotten a call a little after lunch. Papá had answered it expecting some kind of business call. Instead, the Monterey police had notified them that Miguel Rivera had been found dead in his apartment.

The coroner had declared the death a combination of accidental overdose and a heart defect, something no one had caught or known about until he was in the morgue. Alcohol had been found in his system, and the coroner stated that it appeared as if Miguel had gotten drunk and accidentally taken too many of his sleeping pills.

“It doesn’t appear to have been intentional,” Detective Lopez told the family gently, as if it made anything any better, as if that kept Mamá and Abuelita from crying and made Papá stop gripping the steering wheel so tight that Socorro thought his fingers would break. “There wasn’t any foul play either. Just… just bad luck. I’m so sorry.”

The funeral had been hard. Socorro hadn’t seen Miguel in years, so the man in the coffin hadn’t been familiar to her. He looked their father but somehow smaller and more gaunt, dressed in a white button down and dark pants, clean-shaven where Papá had a mustache and shaggy where Papá’s hair was neatly cut. Socorro didn’t know enough about him to know if he was recognizable. Everything felt strange. Distant. Everyone had been crying except for Socorro and she didn’t know why she hadn’t cried. She felt like she should have been. He was her brother, after all.

It just didn’t feel real.

There were reporters inside and paparazzi waiting outside. Not all of the reporters were official. Some of them came up to Mamá and Papá, to Abuelita or Tío Burto, even to her once, and shaken a hand or offered a hug and mentioned how they knew Miguel from ‘work’. They didn’t wear nice suits or dresses. Their clothing was threadbare, their makeup was minimal at best, but they seemed genuine.

They had stories about Miguel, most of them either really funny or really nice. Socorro learned more about Miguel in those few conversations with these people she hadn’t met before than day than she had from any conversation with Abuelita.

Miguel had had a dog in the years before his death, a big mutt he’d named Adelita who’d eaten more of Miguel’s food than Miguel had and sat on Miguel’s feet to keep him from going anywhere when she wanted love.  

Miguel liked Diet Dr. Pepper and made everyone in the bullpen breakfast every Monday.

“Made the  _best huevos rancheros_  this side of the river,” a guy named Erasmo said with something bordering on awe.

Miguel could do a terrifyingly good Texas accent. Multiple people had videos on their phones. They got Mamá to start laughing through her tears and Socorro would always love them for it.

They were the ones that came to the house later with Miguel’s things. A whole life packed up in a bunch of boxes, things from his apartment in Monterey or his desk at the newspaper he’d worked at. If Socorro hadn’t decided she’d like them already from the funeral, she’d have liked them then. The idea of going to Miguel’s apartment, where he’d died and where his body had been for nearly a day before someone had thought to look for him… Mamá had been a wreck when the call had come in. Socorro didn’t want to think about what it would be like for her to see that.

It was bad enough seeing it all in the papers. The death of Miguel Rivera, the prodigal son of the esteemed Rivera family, the great-great-grandson of Héctor and Imelda Rivera… That hadn’t gone unnoticed. Miguel had stayed out of the newsreels for the most part, aside from what he’d written himself, but the tabloids  _loved_ him. Not for the same reasons they’d loved Tío Rodrigo. Miguel wasn’t… hadn’t been a partier, hadn’t been drunk in public or made much fuss. He’d gone to school, lived quietly, become a reporter with some newspaper in Monterey focusing on crime, had even written a book or two on serial killers and unsolved crimes. But there had always been rumors, ever since that Día de los Muertos.

_Whatever happened to Miguelito?_

Miguel had never talked about it but everyone knew about it, or thought they knew about it. He’d disappeared for an entire night, running off at dusk and running back at dawn. Socorro hadn’t even been born yet but with Miguel’s passing, the news revisited it with a relish that made her queasy. The hysteria, the theories, the rumors, so many that outside of the family, no one knew what was real and what wasn’t. Experts on child abuse and sex trafficking spoke to eager pundits, even a few Rivera historians informed a well-versed public on what had happened to Tía Victoria so long ago, their voices dropping and becoming soft and somber.

Mamá and Papá never let her watch the news for long, but she’d seen enough. Videos and photos leaked of her brother’s apartment: a shoebox of a place with water stains and mold visible even through the grainy quality of the leaks. A wall covered in nonsense, bits of paper and post-it notes and pictures. An unmade bed, a bedside table covered with pill bottles and a folding table with a half-empty bottle of tequila on it.

Miguel had died in his sleep but Socorro still knew that he’d suffered. Maybe it hadn’t been a painful death, but he’d suffered.

A rush of  _smell_ had hit them both like a truck when they’d opened the boxes. Somehow, without  _knowing_ it, the smell clicked with Socorro as something undeniably Miguel. Socorro found the names for them buried under the clothing: lavender and lemon incense tucked up with a little burner. It permeated everything. It cracked something in Socorro and her papá that had remained solid and steady since the call had come.

They curled up with each other on the sofa and cried for what felt like forever before they were able to start going through the

The boxes mostly had personal effects. Some clothes, but mostly notebooks, letters, pictures, a couple dozen books and other random things that she and Papá went through. It would be awhile before Mamá could look through them. It would be longer before Abuelita could.

Miguel had kept everything. Every letter Socorro had sent him, every birthday card, every invite to every family event. Every email she’d sent had been printed off and tucked away carefully. She found letters from Mamá and Papá, newspaper articles about her and Rosa and Abel and their other primos.

And a laptop.

It was a bulky thing. Heavy and just a little too big to fit in any backpack Socorro had. She figured Miguel had gotten it second hand; she’d overheard Abuelita despair at how he was too proud to accept money from the family. It had stickers on it: This Machine Kills Fascists, a Princess Peach sticker, a sugar skull.

When she opened it, it was password protected. The lock screen was the family photo from Miguel’s high school graduation, the last time Socorro could remember their family whole and happy. Papá and Mamá’s arms around Miguel’s shoulders, Miguel’s own arm wrapped loosely around Socorro’s in a half-noogie. It was a good picture.

He’d left a few days afterwards. If Socorro strained a little, she could remember sitting in her room, the screaming from downstairs seeming muffled. Miguel, Papá, Mamá, Abuelita. She’d never actually heard Papá yell like that before. She’d never heard Miguel yell like that either, come to think of it.

Miguel had gone to university and hadn’t come back to the house after that. But sometimes he’d call. Abuelita had never taken the calls, even though he’d asked to speak with her a lot. Papá talked to him, and Mamá had talked to him. They didn’t always pass the phone over but sometimes they did. Miguel would ask about school, about music lessons, about the family. She’d have one more person to brag to about how she’d finally mastered that complicated drum rhythm or the A she’d gotten in math.

_“Dang, you’re smarter than me, Coco. I never got A’s in nothing.”_

_“I’m not smarter than you; you’re in college.”_

_“I’m not in college because I’m smart, I’m in college because I’m stubborn.”_

She didn’t get it. She hadn’t gotten it then and she didn’t get it now.

Socorro clicked Forgot Password. The hint popped up, clear as mud.

_first victim_

–

Miguel Rivera woke up dead.

For awhile he just drifted, his brain scattered and everything coming to him distantly, as if through water. He didn’t know how long things just sort of came to him, passing by his periphery without sinking in, but slowly things became to crystalize. It was like he’d ceased to be, and then he was again.

He was Miguel Rivera, and he’d clearly slept through his alarm.

His brain struggled to catch up. All his thoughts were so sluggish that the fact that people were talking didn’t even sink in at first. Miguel struggled to focus.

“Should it take this long? It shouldn’t take this long, surely….”

_So familiar…_

“The doctor said this is normal for someone who dies the way he did. Calm down,  _mi amor_.”

“ _Si, si…_ ”

Miguel groaned in frustration, struggling to pin down the voice. He’d heard it before, he knew he had, where though, where-

“Migue? Miguel,  _mi’jo_ , are you awake?”

_Pepita? Take care of him, will you?_

Miguel jerked upright with a scream. Immediately, hands grabbed his arm, his shoulder, “ _Mi’jo_ , calm down!” The sound of teeth and claws crunching down on bone seemed to echo in, something ingrained in his brain like a crime scene photo, like song, like the look on Ernesto’s face and the look on Héctor’s and and  _and_

 _Héctor_.

Miguel’s insides turned to ice. There was a hand smoothing back his hair, another rubbing soothing circles into the back of his own. He heard weird little clicking noises, clattering.

“There we go, there we go, just breathe.” Miguel obliged, breathing deep and hearing… rattling.

He looked down at the hands in his lap.

 _Oh_.

His brain seemed to work in sections, processing things like an old computer, one thing at a time, bit by bit because that’s all it could handle.

Bones. He was bones. The hand on his own was bone. And there was no soft aura of skin around his hand, no gentle promise of the possibility of going home, of making up with Abuelita or hugging Coco or talking to Mamá and Papá. Nothing. Just bone. Pearly white and dry and  _dead dead dead_.

Miguel forced himself to look away. The room wasn’t his, the bed wasn’t his. Everything was soft pastels, all greens and yellows and off-whites, sterile and minimal. A hospital room.

He’d been in a hospital room before. He’d been in one many, many times. This one was different. The last time he’d been in a hospital, he’d been seventeen and done something stupid and he’d woken up to his parents sitting beside him, wide-eyed and worried.

Now he’d done something stupid and woken up to Héctor and Imelda.

Héctor looked more or less the same since the last time Miguel had seen him: a tall skeleton with salt and pepper hair in an immaculate charro suit. He hadn’t met Imelda, though he knew who she was without any introductions. Even as a skeleton, the casual, effortless elegance continued on. They both stared at him with concern, Héctor’s hand at Miguel’s forehead and Imelda’s at his wrist.

“Miguel?” Héctor said softly. “Are you… are you with us?”

God, he didn’t want to do this. Miguel had been hoping for… maybe four or five more decades before having to deal with this? Minimum? Even then he’d probably have felt cheated, what with Mamá Coco being over a hundred when she died.

He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to say.

He didn’t know why he was  _here_.

“It’s good to see you, Miguel,” Héctor said, his voice still low and careful. “I wish… I wish it wasn’t like this, though. I wish you’d taken a bit longer.”

_You and me both._

“I’m your Papá Héctor,” Héctor said, as if Miguel needed a reminder. “This is your Mamá Imelda. Do you… Do you remember-”

“You died in your sleep,” Imelda cut in gently. “It was an accident. You’ve been here for about a day now, recovering. You’ll be groggy for a while, that’s normal. You’ll be tired. You’ll need a lot more sleep. We have a room for you back at the house so you don’t need to stay here for much longer.”

Miguel looked back down to his hands, the bones clicking together as he fumbled with them, fighting to urge to bring them to his mouth to gnaw. He didn’t have fingernails to gnaw on anymore. He tried to remember what had happened… An accident? He died in his sleep  _accidentally_? He didn’t have the foggiest idea what that was supposed to mean…

“They said that you… got drunk,” Héctor said. “And took too much of your sleeping medication. They think you might have just forgotten that you’d already taken some or, or taken too many by mistake.”

Gotten drunk? Miguel didn’t drink much. He especially didn’t get so drunk that he forgot things, that was dangerous. But if he’d said something, if he’d been brought back by the blessing, they’d have said something by now…

Why had he gotten drunk? Why would he risk that? He struggled to ignore them and their worried looks and  _think_.

It had been his day off. He’d been working on… what he always worked on. And he’d been digging into…

“The reporters,” he muttered, everything rushing back. Héctor and Imelda both went still.

“Reporters?” Imelda asked slowly. “Was someone bothering you, Miguel?” He wondered if she genuinely didn’t know or if she was just playing stupid.

“The ones you killed,” Miguel said before he could think. Thinking was too hard anyway; remembering was exhausting enough at it was.

Imelda and Héctor were quiet for a very long time.

“Miguel,” Héctor said, and Miguel tried to ignore how much Héctor sounded like his own father when he said it: tired and worried and strained all at the same time. “We’ve all been worried about you for awhile now. In the Land of the Living and in the Land of the Dead. You… you don’t come home for Dia de los Muertos, you never had an  _ofrenda_. We’d hear all kinds of things, that you were hurting yourself, hurting other people… we didn’t know what you’d do… or say…”

Miguel burst out laughing.

Héctor and Imelda both jerked away, leaving him floating in a rising tide of hysteria. Distantly, he thought he heard someone knock on the door but Imelda snapped, “We have it under control!” and no one came.

Somewhere along the way, the laughs turned into sobs. Somehow they always did, especially lately. Especially now.

“I…  _couldn’t_ ,” Miguel managed to choke out, his chest inexplicably tightening with panic. “I, I  _couldn’t_!” How many therapists had they taken him too? How many medications had they prescribed him? How many times had he had to break down screaming before they backed off on the suggestion of hypnotists, and the questions, constant questions from everyone, his mamá, his papá, his abuelita, police, reporters, doctors, lawyers, and he couldn’t say anything.

But he could now. Maybe. Just a little.

“You-you killed the reporters,” he said, feeling the words bubble out on the sobs like driftwood on a wave. “You burned the house down and no one noticed, no one connected it but you were, you were nowhere near where you were supposed to be and you wouldn’t get lost, you drove yourselves around everywhere, so, so, so that was it, wasn’t it?”

“ _Mi’jo_ , you need to calm down,” Héctor said sternly, but Miguel couldn’t stop, the words just kept bubbling out, his fingers clattering together as they clenched and unclenched spasmodically.

“That was it, you’d covered everything else up but you couldn’t cover that up because, because you  _died_ so that was  _it_. You know, you know everyone talks a bunch of shit about circumstantial evidence, all the TV shows, they act like it’s not good enough but it  _is_ good enough, you can use it to let people use their own judgment and then, and then they figure things out themselves. So all, all these people die or go missing or  _whatever_ and then you’re on the wrong side of town for no reason at the same time as these reporters that died and they were digging into your background too hard and isn’t it  _weird_ how all these people just kept dying around these beloved figures,  _isn’t it odd_ -”

“ _Miguel_ ,” Imelda said sharply, giving him a shake and making the rush of words stutter. “Miguel, enough.”

Miguel closed his eyes tight and tried to bite back the wild flood. Imelda’s grip on his wrist was almost like a lifeline, something holding him in place so that he didn’t scatter to the wind. Héctor spoke up next to him, his voice softer but still stern, paternal.

“Miguel, we didn’t do any of those things lightly. We didn’t do them because they were easy or without looking for other options. We did those things to keep this family safe from people who would take advantage or hurt us, hurt our children and our grandchildren. People who would hurt our great-grandchildren. People who would hurt you and Socorro, your primos.” Héctor let out a sharp sigh through his teeth. “You said you understood that.”

“I was  _twelve_ ,” Miguel whispered. “I  _lied_.”

The silence that followed was heavy and dark. Miguel tried to use it to calm down, but it felt so thick that all it did was make his chest feel tighter.

What did he do wrong? What else could he have done?

“Miguel,” Imelda said. “Look at me.” Miguel looked up before he could stop himself.

Imelda’s expression was stern, but the hand that came up to cup his cheek was gentle as she said, “We need to know you can be trusted, Miguel. You’ve spent a lot of time on this; it’s meant a lot to you. I’m sorry things happened the way that they did. But we need to make sure that the family is safe here now that we know they’re safe in the Land of the Living. Do you understand?”

Miguel thought of the reporters, burning alive in their own office building. He thought of the lawyer, dead on the floor of his apartment with a bottle of booze by his side.

He thought of the stalker, the one who’d attacked Imelda, unrecognizable in death as anything like human.

Miguel wasn’t stupid. He knew they couldn’t kill him. But that part of his brain that remembered everything, that kept all the little details of every crime scene photo and audio recording and autopsy report he’d ever absorbed ready for dark nights and nightmares knew that dying wasn’t necessarily the worst thing that could happen to you.

Especially not when you were already dead.

“We need to know you’re not going to say anything,” she continued, her voice a low, soothing thread in the growing rush of confusion. “We need to know we can trust you. If not, you’ll need to stay with us for a while, where you’ll be safe and everyone else can be safe too. You’re our family,  _mi’jo_ , and we love you. But we can’t-”

“I can’t,” Miguel said, cutting her off. Imelda stuttered to a stop. “ _I can’t_. I wanted to but I… I can’t…”

He thought about doing it. About saying something. Telling the next doctor or whoever what he knew. The idea made him want to scream, made him want to hide under the blankets like a little kid and never come out.

They’d yelled at him for years for not talking, he didn’t even want to know what they’d do to him if he actually  _talked_.

_a man with a face beaten in so badly that police couldn’t verify his identity with dental work_

_What could you do to a dead man? Lock him up and throw away the key? Put him in a box and throw him in the muck and you’d never see him again, he’d never hear anyone’s voice again, never touch anyone, never see anything ever again until he went crazy but hey, I already am so what’s the big deal there?_

“Migue, we would  _never_!” Miguel didn’t know how much of it had slipped out but Imelda looked horrified and Héctor’s arms wrapped around him, pulled him into a warm and steady hug, a hand holding his head against his chest the way Papá used to after a nightmare. “We’d never hurt you,  _mi’jo_ , never. You’re safe now, you’re alright. You… you just need time. That’s alright. We’ll take you home and you can be with family again,  _sí_? Everyone will be so happy to see you and you can meet everyone and we, we can talk about it all when you’re ready.”

It’d been a very, very long time since anyone had held Miguel. Since anyone had carded their fingers through his hair, since a hand had rubbed his back. Imelda whispered, “Go to sleep, Miguel. We can all talk once you’ve gotten some rest.”

“You’re safe,” Héctor repeated as the energy that had fueled so much panic in Miguel flagged, fell away in the face of overwhelming care, leaving him drowsy and weak. “I’ve got you, Miguel. You’re safe.”

He was so tired. So, so tired.

He’d think about it later.

Héctor tucked Miguel under his chin, humming something aimless and soothing as Miguel slipped into sleep.


End file.
